Farming at the end of the world

#blog

Our world as we know it is probably going to collapse. What it will look like on the other side is uncertain, but our scientists are scared at best and terrified at worst. Governments have acknowledged they feel unable to mitigate the incoming damage, and have asked people to build stronger communities to prepare for what's to come.

Our word "culture", the sum total of our beliefs, customs and institutions, is derived from "cultivate", which means:

"To improve and prepare (land), as by plowing or fertilizing, for raising crops; till."

• Wordnik Dictionary

The moment we turned over the soil - the beginning of agriculture, around 4000 years ago - we assumed we could do a better job than the countless species of bacteria, fungus, worms, insects, roots and seeds that had been working this job for eternity. "Agriculture" means "the science of cultivating soil, producing crops, and raising livestock", and is synonymous with "farming". They are all tied to the subversion and destruction of traditional soil ecosystems.

Indigenous "farming culture" had an immense respect for soil^[1]. The rishis, sages who carried ancient knowledge in the land now known as India, regarded the soil as a mother. Ploughing was forbidden, for many believed ploughing would turn it to sand. Despite the "lack" of knowledge of microbes, viruses and interactions in indigenous "culture", they were deeply attuned to insights we are still yet to crack. The rainmakers of Kenya are still able to predict the weather with higher accuracy than meteorology, and western weather forecasters are now asking them for help. But more importantly, their "culture" kept them not only in balance with nature, but stopped them from doing unnecessary work that nature was skilled at.

Agriculture (in the sense of tilling farming) will have to end, because we have only sustained agricultural methods by compensating with fertilizer, machinery and other inventions. At some point, we took a massive dive in food productivity when we fired all the insects, and started not only doing their jobs for them, but combatting their subsequent uprisings. Plagues of bugs and diseases have infected human-flooded rice fields and neat rows of crops, and we've been fighting them ever since. We commend ourselves when we discover cures to curses we summoned in the first place.

But back to the productivity hit. To my knowledge, we don't have any surviving indigenous food production systems that could serve as a comparison for our "superior" way of farming, which we have arrived at through scientific thinking. This means we don't have a fair comparison to benchmark agriculture against; we are comparing agriculture to the shadow of itself.

What's even more of a joke is that we measure agriculture's productivity in terms of yearly yields, and are only now caring about yields averaged over longer terms, because we've discovered our highest yield methods actually destroy the top-soil; we are stealing food from the future with a one-way time machine, and claiming we've found the most productive methods of farming.

So this begs the question: if modern agriculture is descended from a path of asking how we can improve productivity, but we've destroyed all traces of nature's benchmark for productivity, how can we say we're really much better off than before we started farming?

We can't really answer this question; not without returning to a method of food production that at least resembles that of our forgotten past. But I will speculate anyway, using Masanobu Fukuoka's lazy-farming method, which is perhaps the closest thing to indigenous farming that I know of, and of all modern farming methods, promises the highest yield per acre, and its yields do not diminish over time.

Fukuoka arrived at this technique not with western scientific knowledge, but with decades of presence, imitating nature's processes as closely as possible. Given that any indigenous people we now know of have lived for tens thousands of years, their food production techniques were likely on a similar productivity, being able to benefit from orders of magnitude more time attuning to nature's patterns.

The answer to the world's farming problems does not likely lie in a modern laboratory, hydroponics or chemical fertilisers. Agriculture has only a few inventions that have taken more steps forward than backward, and even for a "success", it's difficult to tell whether it's just another time machine.

No, the better place to search for our future's food production methods are deep in the indigenous pasts which our "civilisation" has tried to burn, bury and replace. But that is the beauty of indigenous knowledge; it consciously defers to a timeless deity we can never fully dissect, and so even if its knowledge is lost for a while, we can rediscover it through attunement. The loss of legacy, life and people to date is painful, in ways I'm sure I cannot comprehend. But I am hopeful that you will see native culture as central to your future, because the lone empire of rationality cannot give you one.

God is not the things we are yet to explain, but the things we will never be able to explain. We thought we could play god with nature because we thought we could understand nature by isolating a handful of its ever-changing components. But most of nature's complexity lies beyond sum of its parts, and as long as a single human is the one selecting which species grow where - in what soil, with whom - they cannot possibly predict the consequences of their actions.